New years resolutions for mobile operators: “Be nice”

January 3, 2007

Imagine how wonderful it would be if mobile operators wrote these new years resolutions and promised to keep them. (It’s a complete fantasy of course, but there’s no harm in dreaming)

Stop making our customers choose their tariffs in advance for the next 18 months.
There’s a risk that customers might make the wrong decision and choose a tariff that is too high for them, and end up wasting money. Let’s stop taking advantage of our customers like this. In future, we will let our customers change tariff as and when they want. Even better, lets do it for them automatically depending on their level of phone usage each month. While we are at it, lets build smaller gaps between our tariff prices so that they always fit our customers’ needs perfectly.

Stop punishing our customers for going over their monthly quotas
The OFT recently ruled that UK banks can no longer give customers punitive charges when they go over their overdrafts. This is good – it’s just not right to punish your customers and profiteer out of their mistakes. In the new year, we are going to take the initiative and do the same for our customers – i.e. stop charging them silly money when they run over their quota for minutes, data, texts, or whatever.

Stop acting like Evil Genies
Evil Genies play with words so that what they promise seems to be one thing, but when delivered it is quite different. For example, sometimes we call things “unlimited” with a footnote in tiny writing that they are in fact limited, or sometimes when we display the monthly price of a package, we list the introductory price, which in fact only applies for 2 of the 18 months of the contract. We are going to stop doing this because it’s mean, and we want to be nice to our customers from now on.

Make quotas and charges very, very visible
From now on, customers will see their quotas displayed clearly on the home screen of their phones. This way, they can easily alter their usage so that they use their exact quota of minutes (etc), without wasting a drop. Also, we are going to display the data transfer prices / quotas very clearly within email and web browser applications, so users can easily monitor what they are spending. While abroad, these figures will change to accurately represent the prices.